Dashiell Hammett and the Movies

By William H. Mooney

As the father of the hardboiled detective genre, Dashiell Hammett had a huge influence on Hollywood. Yet, it is easy to forget how adaptable Hammett’s work was, fitting into a variety of genres and inspiring generations of filmmakers.
Dashiell Hammett and the Movies offers the first comprehensive look at Hammett’s broad oeuvre and how it was adapted into films from the 1930s all the way into the 1990s. Film scholar William H. Mooney reveals the wide range of films crafted from the same Hammett novels, as when The Maltese Falcon was filmed first as a pre-Code sexploitation movie, then as a Bette Davis screwball comedy, and finally as the Humphrey Bogart classic. He also considers how Hammett rose to Hollywood fame not through the genre most associated with him, but through a much fizzier concoction, the witty murder mystery The Thin Man. To demonstrate the hold Hammett still has over contemporary filmmakers, the book culminates in an examination of the Coen brothers’ pastiche Miller’s Crossing. 
Mooney not only provides us with an in-depth analysis of Hammett adaptations, he also chronicles how Hollywood enabled the author’s own rise to stardom, complete with a celebrity romance and a carefully crafted public persona. Giving us a behind-the-scenes look at the complex power relationships, cultural contexts, and production concerns involved in bringing Hammett’s work from the page to the screen, Dashiell Hammett and the Movies offers a fresh take on a literary titan. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Nov 3, 2014
• ISBN: 9780813573045

Book preview

Dashiell Hammett and the Movies

Dashiell Hammett and the Movies

William H. Mooney

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mooney, William H., 1948–

Dashiell Hammett and the movies / William H. Mooney.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978–0–8135–6253–7 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–0–8135–6252–0 (pbk.: alk. paper) — ISBN 978–0–8135–6254–4 (e-book)

1. Hammett, Dashiell, 1894–1961—Film adaptations. 2. Film adaptations—History and criticism. I. Title.

PS3515.A4347Z78 2015

813'.52—dc23

2014000067

Copyright © 2014 by William H. Mooney

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

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Manufactured in the United States of America

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Inferior Hammett or Exemplary Hollywood?

Chapter 1. Three Early Films: Roadhouse Nights (1930), City Streets (1931), and Mister Dynamite (1935)

Chapter 2. Celebrity: The Thin Man (1934)

Chapter 3. After The Thin Man: From Sequel to Series

Chapter 4. Lillian Hellman: Woman in the Dark (1934) and Watch on the Rhine (1943)

Chapter 5. Sexual Politics: The Maltese Falcon (1931), Satan Met a Lady (1936), and The Maltese Falcon (1941)

Chapter 6. Ethnic Politics: The Glass Key (1935 and 1942)

Chapter 7. Hammett in Retrospect: Miller’s Crossing (1990)

Conclusion: Dashiell Hammett and the Movies

Notes

Bibliography

Index

About the Author

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank President Joyce F. Brown and the Board of Directors of the Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York, for their continuing support, especially for a sabbatical leave that allowed me to develop the proposal for this book. Thanks also to FIT’s Teaching Institute for research and conference travel grants, and to the Interlibrary Loan department of the Gladys Marcus Library, in particular Paul Lajoie, for fast and reliable help with research materials.

The collections of the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences were extremely useful—thank you, Jenny Romero, for making the use of the library such a convenient and enjoyable experience. I am grateful to the Harry Ransom Center, the University of Texas at Austin, for access to Dashiell Hammett’s treatment for City Streets, and to Literature/Film Quarterly for permission to include here material from my 2011 article on film versions of The Maltese Falcon. A more personal thanks is due long-time friends and colleagues at the Literature/Film Association, particularly Peter Lev and Thomas Leitch for helpful advice on more than one occasion. Thank you, Gary Collins, for good copies of several films.

I am grateful to Leslie Mitchner, my editor at Rutgers University Press, for her initial enthusiasm and for the wisdom of experience she brought to the project. (Thanks also to Art Simon for suggesting Rutgers as a good place to submit the proposal.) Thank you, Jeffrey Riman and Brian Emery, for help with the photos. A special word of appreciation goes to my good friend Scott Stoddart, dean of the School of Liberal Arts at FIT, for his careful reading and editorial suggestions, and even more importantly for his encouragement and moral support at every stage. Finally, I owe my wife, Margaret Mercer, and son, William Mercer Mooney, a debt of gratitude for so many things, among them tolerating my preoccupation with this project.

Introduction

Inferior Hammett or Exemplary Hollywood?

Dashiell Hammett is remembered, first and foremost, for his part in creating the hard-boiled detective story. With Carroll John Daly at the pulp-fiction magazine Black Mask, he was the writer whose groundbreaking work and reputation made him the emblematic figure of the new genre. First as the Continental Op, who appeared in numerous stories and two novels—most importantly Red Harvest—then as Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, Hammett’s detective was the model of an investigator who, in the Op’s words, stirs things up and by tough persistence as much as intelligence follows the evidence wherever it leads, with results that include disillusion and loss.¹ Hammett’s reputation always had a biographical element, the recognition that he had worked as a Pinkerton operative before, and briefly after, World War I. He was fortunate in being admired and imitated by Raymond Chandler, whose Philip Marlowe developed and to some extent altered the type on which Hammett’s enduring reputation depends. Our first surprise, then, in a book about the movies based on Hammett’s writing is that almost none of the films—really only one among the nineteen considered here—focus on the hard-boiled detective.

Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade is so enduring an image that he remains the iconic representative of Hammett’s fiction on film. In fact, Bogart in The Maltese Falcon (1941), followed by his role as Philip Marlowe in Howard Hawks’s The Big Sleep (1946), further consolidated the literary image of the hard-boiled detective, such that going forward any detective slouching along a dark rainy street would evoke some composite character we might think of as Spade-Marlowe-Bogart, associated in the minds of the uninstructed with that two-headed author, Hammett-Chandler. This detective was the figure that would remain a pop-culture icon throughout the latter part of the twentieth century, accreting aspects of the Hammett biography—from his elegant and aloof public persona to his reputation for drink and womanizing, his relationship with Lillian Hellman, and his politics, which included a willingness to go to prison rather than cooperate during the Cold War witch hunts.

Because of his association with the hard-boiled detective, Hammett’s name is frequently forgotten in connection with his even more frequently revived movie, The Thin Man (1934), in which Myrna Loy and William Powell made Nick and Nora Charles an iconic couple with a cultural reach as extensive as Bogart’s Spade. If Loy and Powell embody these characters in the public mind as Bogart is our image of Spade, their images are less associated with Dashiell Hammett—in fact, many who fondly remember that film forget or recall with surprise that Hammett is the author, a mistake no one makes concerning The Maltese Falcon (1941). The reason is obvious—the buoyant couple falls outside what is remembered as Hammett’s greatest achievement, the hard-boiled detective story. The Thin Man (1934) is in a different register from the prototypical film noir, just as the novel on which it was based is different from those in the hard-boiled mode, a reason many critics found it inferior.

All of the Spade/Bogart/Hammett mythology must be put aside, then, as we consider the other films that Hollywood made from Hammett’s work. A few, like the two earlier versions of The Maltese Falcon, remain within the conventions of Hollywood detective comedies of the 1930s, but others participate in genres from the newspaper film to the gangster film to screwball comedy to postmodern pastiche. These films remain significant in themselves: nearly all were A-list projects of major studios with important stars and directors, and taken together they offer a profile of the interaction of Hammett’s work with the film industry, a case study of one author’s dissemination and diffusion through the cultural machinery of the cinema.

In some instances, the process of their adaptation—particularly where there are several film versions—casts new light on Hammett’s novels, highlighting the permutation of ideas of the couple in The Thin Man, for example, the dual plot structure of The Maltese Falcon, or the ethnic allegory performed by The Glass Key. Dashiell Hammett and the Movies furthermore draws attention to unknown and little-known films—particularly the early films Roadhouse Nights (1930), City Streets (1931), The Maltese Falcon (1931), Woman in the Dark (1934), and Mister Dynamite (1935), though my fondness for these may have become exaggerated from spending so much time with them. In any case, Dashiell Hammett and the Movies fills a void in the literature by examining the films from Hammett’s writing and by bringing together in one volume information otherwise available only in widely scattered sources. While the book pretends neither to exhaustive research on any one film nor definitive coverage of the many intersecting areas of film study—from period history to genre to the nature of sequels to auteurist portrait or star reputation and reception—it undertakes to explain within wider cultural and industry contexts what shaped the films, emphasizing the events, choices, and relationships that governed the particular direction taken by each. In this respect, it contributes further detail to a growing understanding of the interrelationship of books, films, Hollywood, and their cultural context.

As a title, Dashiell Hammett and the Movies frames one of the book’s primary challenges, which is to place the body of writing by a single author in its proper but extremely varied relationship with nineteen films, given that the role of Hammett’s fictions ranges from determinant to merely one ingredient among many. Thus, in some degree, the book is about adaptation, though to announce this fact is to raise a host of theoretical and practical questions. Are we using adaptation as a noun or in its verb form, referring to a product to be viewed in a certain light or to a process of transmutation? Should we discuss Satan Met a Lady (1936) as an adaptation of Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, of the 1931 film of that name, or of both? Should we consider Hammett’s screenplay for Watch on the Rhine (1943) as an adaptation of Lillian Hellman’s stage play, an extension of the source text adapted in making the film, or as an intermediate text sharing qualities of the source while itself being subject to adaptation into the film? To what extent is Mister Dynamite an adaptation of Hammett when his contribution was a brief story outline at the beginning of an extended development process? If such issues of multiple sources, ambiguity about the status of precursor texts, and the serial authorship of film narratives are fundamental to adaptation study, the movies made from Hammett’s writing are an excellent laboratory.

Even while we bear Hammett’s work in mind in examining these films, we must of course distance ourselves—along with the majority of adaptation scholars in recent years—from any notion of fidelity as a primary goal or measure of value. In his oft-cited 1984 essay, Dudley Andrew could already complain that the most tiresome discussion of adaptation concerned fidelity and transformation, tiresome because of the repeated, unfounded assumption that the task of adaptation is the reproduction of something essential about an original text.² Forty years earlier, André Bazin had suggested that filmmakers typically set goals that have more to do with the needs of their audiences than with fidelity to the source.³ As Thomas Leitch has written recently, It should be clear by now that fidelity, even as a goal, is the exception to the norm.⁴ Or in Linda Hutcheon’s words, There are many and varied motives behind adaptation and few involve faithfulness.⁵ Motives, as well as the contingences of changing historical contexts, are indeed the crucial issue. Robert Stam has usefully described their combination in terms of filters, of "studio style, ideological fashion, political and economic constraints, auteurist predilection, charismatic stars, cultural values, and so forth, making an adaptation an interested reading of a novel and the circumstantially shaped ‘writing’ of a film."⁶

With respect to the adaptation of Hammett, a question that repeatedly arises is the degree of knowledge an audience has of the source text. For most scholars the viewer’s role is paramount in constructing the interrelationship between source(s) and film. Hutcheon, for example, writes of a constant oscillation between [the adapted work] and the new adaptation we are experiencing.⁷ Stam prefers the more broadly applicable idea of intertextuality, referring to an effective co-presence of two texts.⁸ In any case, a work is understood as intertextual or as an adaptation only in the degree that we are aware of a precursor text. If we do not know the adapted work, as Hutcheon writes, "we will not experience the work as an adaptation.⁹ It is only as inherently double, or multilaminated works, she argues, that they can be theorized as adaptations."¹⁰

This necessary recognition of the precursor text is the main reason that adaptation scholars have focused on films from the best-known sources—canonical and popular literary works, as well as inherited stories of less certain origin—and where the debt is openly proclaimed. Thus Andrew narrowed his attention to "the explicit, foregrounded relation of a cinematic text to a well-constructed original text,"¹¹ echoed in Hutcheon’s definition of adaptations as deliberate, announced, extended revisitations of prior works.¹² But how many of the nineteen films from Hammett’s writing fulfill these requirements? A third of them, at best. Screen credit acknowledging the legal debt of a film to a novel or its author is no guarantee that viewers will oscillate between texts, as Hutcheon suggested. Audiences would certainly not have done so as they watched Roadhouse Nights, loosely based on Red Harvest, when Hammett was little known. This would have been even more the case with City Streets, which was developed from a story Hammett wrote for hire at Paramount and to which audiences had no direct access. Warner Bros. used the title Satan Met a Lady to lead viewers away from the source novel and the earlier film of The Maltese Falcon. The five sequels to The Thin Man adapted mainly characters and a relationship, referencing primarily the 1934 movie and basing their narratives respectively on an original story by Hammett, an earlier Black Mask story that he incorporated into a new story outline, and three narratives by other writers. Woman in the Dark was based on a Hammett novella that was, and remains, significantly less known than his novels. In these cases and others, motives and circumstances of the moment were at work from the beginning in the selection of Hammett material and throughout the process of defining the films. Only John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon and W. S. Van Dyke’s The Thin Man can be imagined as having been conceived with any notion of fidelity to their source. Close consideration of the factors more obviously shaping the films leads us, in many cases, away from the Hammett source material.

Yet the book must maintain something of a double focus. By design, we deliberately oscillate between films and sources. We look for the signs of Hammett’s contribution even where we realize that viewers would have ignored them, their minds occupied instead with memories of familiar stars, other recent films, and generic expectations, as well as with the circumstances of their lives outside the cinema. Only this double perspective of critic and ordinary viewer allows us to understand the process of dissemination and diffusion of Hammett’s work through the films that absorbed or transmitted it.

What should be obvious, but which probably needs to be stated nonetheless, is that Hollywood’s values and images of the world were not those of Dashiell Hammett. Lovers of Hammett’s fiction recognize the intellectual rigor in his artistry, a thoroughgoing understanding of the weight of words in their relationship to characters, events in the narratives, and the conceptual formulation of his novels. Yet Hammett’s writings were embraced by Hollywood for more timely, superficial characteristics and themes—the gangsters, the corruption of urban life, political intrigue, mystery, adventure, and the celebration of Prohibition-era freedoms. The Hammett who was deeply and philosophically in sync with his era makes his way into the cinema surreptitiously, through Trojan horses of narrative, character, dialogue, and imagery. Hollywood generally ignores the something essential in Andrew’s definition of adaptation in favor of elements useful for its own economic projects and in its differently circumscribed cultural domain. Recognizing this difference between Hollywood and Hammett, we must ultimately insist on valuing the films as exemplary Hollywood rather than as inferior Hammett.

So the double focus on Hammett and on the films leaves us with two interrelated stories to tell. One emphasizes Hammett’s contribution; the other finds its expression mainly in response to the question of what shaped any particular film. Was it an attempt to recapture something in Hammett’s writing? Was it a desire to produce an exemplar of a popular genre? Was the goal to capitalize on the prior success of a star or story, or to sidestep Production Code censorship in delivering a predictably successful commodity? In most cases, the competing interests in a film’s production are mediated through the rigorous craftsmanship and industrial machinery of the classical Hollywood studios.

Hammett’s development as a writer occurred at a different pace and with a different logic from Hollywood studios and their audiences. This book generally follows his movie involvement, while it also brings together films related to the same source material. Chapter 1 examines three early films, Roadhouse Nights, City Streets, and Mister Dynamite. The first two were developed by Paramount, the third by Warner Bros. Roadhouse Nights was to be based on the gangster elements in Red Harvest, and shortly thereafter David O. Selznick advocated hiring Hammett to write a gangster film for Gary Cooper, which became City Streets. Before that film was released, Darryl Zanuck had signed Hammett to a contract to write a story for another picture. Hammett’s outline—entitled On the Make and featuring a crooked private eye—was eventually rejected by Warner Bros., only to be revived by Universal after the success of The Thin Man and released as Mister Dynamite.

Chapter 2 is devoted to The Thin Man, Hammett’s last novel yet the beginning of his important contribution to film. The extraordinary success of The Thin Man, in perfect harmony with the zeitgeist of 1933 and 1934 when the novel and the film appeared, transformed Hammett in the view of the film industry from an ordinary scribbler into a proven asset whose talent they hoped to exploit and whose name could be used in marketing a film. Chapter 3 takes up the five Thin Man films that followed, released over a period of eleven years from 1936 to 1947. These are best understood as extending and repeating a successful formula, initially as a sequel and then in a series, while accommodating the aging of the films’ stars.

The Thin Man reflected Hammett’s broader social experience after the literary success of The Maltese Falcon, including his relationship with Lillian Hellman. Chapter 4 proceeds to the other works reflecting this relationship: Woman in the Dark from the novella of the same name, with Luise Fischer as its strong protagonist, and Watch on the Rhine (1943), based on Hammett’s screenplay from Hellman’s Broadway hit.

Chapter 5 takes up the three Warner Bros. versions of The Maltese Falcon. Because of the dates of these successive productions, a comparative view reveals with unusual clarity how the development of industry self-censorship conditioned their adaptation. The first, which was released in 1931 and might otherwise be grouped with the early films, was developed with a pre-Code emphasis on Bebe Daniels’s erotic appeal. The second, entitled Satan Met a Lady, was a screwball battle of the sexes reshaped by casting Bette Davis as the female lead opposite Warren William. The third, John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon, the best-known Hammett film after The Thin Man, shifts the focus to Humphrey Bogart as the archetypal private detective and anticipates film noir.

Chapter 6 similarly focuses on the two Paramount versions of The Glass Key (1935 and 1942), crime films in which the gangsters and a mystery plot are transposed into the political arena of a Tammany Hall–style political machine and boss. The Glass Key was Hammett’s most ambitious attempt to go beyond genre fiction, but the government corruption and the ethnic tribalism he portrayed, fundamental to the Tammany Hall system, were also areas of concern for the Production Code Administration. Thus, the first of the two films, while re-forming the novel’s narrative within Hollywood conventions, shows the strain of repressing criticism of government and the immigrant/ethnic basis of the system; the second film strives above all to capitalize on the screen chemistry between Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake following the production of This Gun for Hire (1942). Chapter 7 follows Hammett’s reputation in the 1970s and after, with particular attention to the Coen brothers’ Miller’s Crossing (1990), an homage to Hammett and a postmodern confection in complex dialogue with all versions of The Glass Key. Hammett, like all authors, focuses and transmits elements of the cultural environment that produced him. The fate of an author’s books, like that of a body in the ground, is to return what has become of their ingredients to the soil, a sort of cultural composting. Dashiell Hammett and the Movies observes that process with particular emphasis on the role of cinema.

1

Three Early Films

Roadhouse Nights (1930), City Streets (1931), and Mister Dynamite (1935)

Dashiell Hammett’s introduction to Hollywood came during his most productive period as a writer. He submitted Poisonville to Alfred A. Knopf in February 1928,¹ and it was published as Red Harvest a year later. In the meantime, between August and November 1928, Hammett was exchanging ideas about revisions of The Dain Curse with Knopf editor Harry C. Block.² By then The Maltese Falcon had already been submitted in June, so that Block left it to Hammett to decide which book would be published first.³ The Dain Curse came out in June 1929 and The Maltese Falcon in February 1930, the same month that Hammett completed his next novel, The Glass Key.⁴

As his literary reputation blossomed, Hammett quickly came to understand the potential for movie earnings. He was still an unknown when Red Harvest was picked up by Paramount for a modest amount in September 1929,⁵ but by the following June, Warner Bros. agreed with Knopf to pay $8,500 for rights to The Maltese Falcon, Hammett getting 80 percent.⁶ By July 1930, David O. Selznick was advocating that Paramount hire him for $300 a week, with a $5,000 bonus for the story that became City Streets (1931).⁷ In January of 1931, Darryl Zanuck at Warner Bros. offered him $5,000 to sign another contract, which specified $5,000 more for a treatment, and an additional $5,000 if the story was accepted for production.⁸ Hammett received the first $10,000, but On the Make was rejected by Warner Bros. in April 1931; only later, after the success of The Thin Man, was this story resold to Universal and made as Mister Dynamite. In April 1932, when The Glass Key was published in the United States, the movie rights were sold to Paramount for $25,000.

It was the violence of Red Harvest that attracted Hollywood, its gangsters rather than the mystery story or detection, for gangsters were everywhere at the time. As Will Hays, president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA), would write, The gangster cult had been a main theme of journalism for a decade.⁹ Along with the acquisition of Red Harvest, Paramount studio head B. P. Schulberg, with Gary Cooper under contract, wanted Hammett to write a gangster film for Coop.¹⁰ But Hammett’s literary reputation soon altered Hollywood’s perception of him. By January 1931, after the publishing success of The Maltese Falcon, executives at Warner Bros. wanted Hammett to create, in Richard Layman’s words, an original Sam Spade story for a movie starring William Powell.¹¹

Roadhouse Nights, City Streets, and Mister Dynamite—along with the 1931 version of The Maltese Falcon and Woman in the Dark (1934)—represent Hammett’s transition from an unknown author to a successful novelist employed by the studios. Yet until the success of The Thin Man, he was still treated as a hack, a supplier of raw material for an industry turning out some four hundred movies each year. Thus Roadhouse Nights would be shaped primarily by another writer, Ben Hecht. City Streets would be organized